


this life could be the last

by TheBirdOfHermesIsMyName



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Gen, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, everyone is a walking disaster, god this is a trainwreck, im so sorry, like glacial, mature rating is mostly because violence, this asexual author is Bad at the romances but is going to give it a go, this is something i told myself i would never ever write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-04-21 22:54:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14295237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBirdOfHermesIsMyName/pseuds/TheBirdOfHermesIsMyName
Summary: Nohara Rin died at the hand of her closest friend and teammate, and a murdered twenty year old woman wakes up to rain, blood, an unconscious boy and a beast in her head.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> wow here's one thing i told myself i'd never ever write. original character fics can get, uhh, fairly mixed receptions. but i'm bored and this wouldn't leave me alone. hopefully the characters don't make ppl wanna poke their eyes out lmao.

_“Open your eyes, Rin, and save them all.”_

 

* * *

 

First: It’s raining. As her last moments play over and over and over again behind her closed eyelids, each raindrop causes her to flinch as though struck. 

Second: there is a stiffness to her chest and an ache in her bones but she’s _breathing_ and can’t feel the _stingburnthrob_ of how she died.

She cracks open her eyes and shifts her heavy head to look around. 

Third: there is an unconscious boy lay on his side just a couple of feet away from her.

And fourth: there is something in her head, something raging and _furious,_ and it isn’t her own voice that is too busy screaming hysterics that this is _wrongwrongwrong._

She tries to piece things together, but she finds she has started shaking. She is shaking and shaking and shaking and she feels wrong in this body; it’s too small, too muscular, with angles that aren’t hers and _she should be dead—_

The boy has silver hair, is wearing dark, durable clothing that has seen better days, and has a metal plate on a band across his head. In her silent, shaking hysteria, she dimly registers that she knows where she is, and when she is, and _who_ she is.

Two sets of memories war in her head, and a choked sob catches in her throat and turns to a retch as she remembers knives and cruel hands, and lightning piercing through her heart.

Rin — _that’s not my name that’s not my n a m e —_ vomits blood and whatever sheRinshe had eaten earlier. 

There is a part of her that desperately wants to go to the boy, wake him up and heal him with abilities that should not exist and she should not know, but there is another part of her that screams that this isn’t possible, she should be dead and not— _not—_

_Not in a dumb show she watched with her little brother._

(But she doesn’t have a brother, not here, not in this war-torn, cruel country or anywhere in this world, she doesn’t even have parents, she lives in her own ratty apartment with no one but her sensei, his wife and her two — _one only one but wait shouldn’t there be another —_ friends to keep the loneliness at bay.)

She aches. The scarring across her chest is tight and uncomfortable and sets a throbbing in her shoulder and an exhaustion in her bones like nothing she has ever felt except in her last days as— as— _what was her name?_

She is, somehow, impossibly, Nohara Rin, and as she drags herself over to the prone body of Hatake Kakashi, a sob works its way up her throat and chokes out of her mouth. She reaches out, fists a hand in his shirt and stumbles over the name of a person that shouldn’t exist. “K—Kakashi…”

The feel of a real, warm body beneath her hand makes this all the more terrifying, and she buries her face in his side and squeezes her eyes shut, but that just makes the darkness and the pain and the terror of Before flash before her and she has to open them again and face this terrible reality so that she doesn’t go insane.

There are bodies all around them — _Enemy Kiri —_ and blood watered down by the rain. Beneath her, Kakashi flinches, and she is dimly aware of something warm and crackling in her periphery senses, like ozone in the air or on her tongue, or a hum of a generator in her ears and one set of memories tells her that she’s crazy and another says that she’s just sensing Kakashi’s chakra as he wakes up.

“Rin…?” A grey eye blinks blearily up at her as though Kakashi was doubting he was awake at all. And then it goes wide, one hand reaching up to pull the headband — _hitai-ate —_ over the scarred eye and the other grasping at her flak jacket. _“Rin—_ How—?”

How how how she _doesn’t know_. She wonders what she must look like, clothes torn and soaking wet with water and blood and tears and vomit and decides that she must look too much like however they will find her body in Before, and another bubble of hysteria works its way up her throat. She can’t stop shaking.

Kakashi takes her shoulders and pulls her close, desperately, and she thinks he might be shaking too, although that could just be because she must be rattling his bones with how severely she is trembling. She tries to relax into the hold, because she knows Kakashi doesn’t she? Doesn’t she?

(The thought that no, she doesn’t, she doesn’t know or have anyone in this world she’s just an _imposter who should have died in the body of a girl who shouldn’t exist and who also should have fucking_ ** _died_ ** is lonely, and leaves her feeling cold.)

“Rin— The seal— The _bijuu—“_

She flinches, because _right._ Nohara Rin. She is Nohara Rin. The girl who died a hero to save her village from a rampaging bijuu.  Except that she didn’t, because she’s here, Rin is alive and she’s _her_ and there is absolutely a beast in the back of her head and somewhere deeper inside her than her atheist background would have let her believe possible _Before._  

“It— It’s gone. Th—The seal,” and god she can’t stop trembling, “The— The bijuu is— It’s there— It’s _there—“_ She has to stop, because her voice is wavering and she’s ready to start screaming and crying and rocking back and forth until men in white jackets just come and _take_ her already, because as horrifyingly real as this all seems she can’t quite fathom that she is here, in a place that she knows only from fiction, and alive and breathing.

“I—“ Kakashi clears his throat, letting go of her to reach for something in his kunai pouch. He pulls out a three-pronged kunai with sealing she doesn’t understand inscribed on it. _Hiraishin._ “Sensei, he— He’ll know what to do. We should get out of the open,” Kakashi says, sounding surer and surer of himself as he grips the kunai tight in one hand and takes her arm in the other. He staggers upright, pulling her with him.

She stands and it feels wrong. She is too short and slender; she feels as though a change in the wind would knock her over, but Kakashi slings her arm around him, and then they _jump_ and she infuses chakra into it because this is war and her instincts are honed even as inside her head she screams at the wrongness of it all, and they land safely in the cover of trees. Kakashi cleanly throws the kunai over his shoulder and into a nearby branch without even looking, his attention entirely on her and on settling her down against the trunk.

There is a yellow flash, and she thinks _safety_ and also _this man is going to die._

Blue eyes that should be filled with kindness and not the harrowed weariness of war scope the area, and then fall on Kakashi, and on her. Minato Namikaze, Minato-sensei, Kushina’s husband, Naruto’s father, Yondaime, Yellow Flash. This man is going to die. This man is going to _die._ It aches, it aches fiercely and she wants to scream and deny it because this is just a show or some delusion, but after the feel of Kakashi’s very real hands she is left with an awful terror of everything in this world that is so war-torn and violent and no place for her. _(This man is going to die.)_

“—hear me? Rin? Kakashi, she’s going into shock, how much blood did she lose?” 

“I—I can’t say— The Chidori was all I could manage before losing consciousness.”

Her ears are ringing with the roars of a bijuu and the rain in the trees.

“—back to Konoha.”

Hands on her, around her shoulders and under her knees, she’s flinching violently at the contact, she’s rising, lifted. Eyes like a summer sky and a halo of blonde hair is the last she sees.

_Why am I alive?_

_Why did Nohara Rin survive?_

 

* * *

 

As soon as she comes to she knows she’s in a hospital; she’s spent too much time on placement to not recognise the sounds bustling activity and scent of disinfectant. The room is bright when she opens her eyes; it’s daytime, and beyond that distinct hospital smell is that of a warm summer sun on trees. She’s in Konoha.

The bijuu is silent in her head, but as she shifts a hand over her stomach she can feel some kind of residual chakra there — _sea salt and waves Kushina did this —_ and knows it isn’t gone. 

“Rin?”

The name that is hers and isn’t. She flicks her eyes over to Kakashi, who is waking from what must have been a very uncomfortable doze in that chair beside her bed. He leans forwards slightly, hesitant, and after running his eyes over her features and vitals he averts his gaze completely.

“I…thought I’d killed you.”

_But you didn’t. Someone else did. You should have killed this body, this girl, but somehow you didn’t._

“I’m alive,” she says, Rin says, her voice hoarse. She wonders if she screamed while they fixed the seal on the bijuu.

Kakashi clears his throat after a beat. “The bijuu healed you. Your heart was completely reformed but it left you exhausted and you went into shock. Kushina-san and Minato-sensei fixed your seal.” He stands abruptly, makes to say something more, but stops himself. Kakashi leaves without another word.

She wants to call out for him, ask him to stay. She doesn’t. She can’t when all she can see is Kakashi’s horror-struck face juxtaposing with _his_ satisfied smirk, a hand crackling with electricity and clean through her chest, and a knife, cold and unforgiving, in the exact same position.

_I’m alive._

 

* * *

 

Minato knocks on the door sometime later, holding a bag of takeaway in one hand and a gift basket in the other and a smile on his face. She tries to smile, because she knows him through both memory and the medium of a television screen and knows that he is a kind, good man, but she can’t quite manage it. 

“I thought I’d take the liberty of getting you some ramen; I’ve had plenty of unfortunate experiences with the food here, so I thought you might appreciate something less…lumpy,” he says with a bright smile, placing the paper bag on her bedside table. The gift basket is offered out to her. “Kushina-san put this together for you, too.”

She — _RinRinRin —_ takes it with hands that shake. A yellow rabbit with a green Konoha leaf stitched on the foot, a couple of medical journals she hasn’t read, a potted _aloe vera,_ and a card wishing her well signed by Kushina, Minato and Kakashi (except, she notes, that it’s Minato’s handwriting and not Kakashi’s for his own name). Tears prick her eyes. She appreciates it. She _does._ But— But she doesn’t know what to _say,_ how to react, because yes she is Rin and Rin is her but— _but she isn’t just that anymore._  

She is Rin, she is _a name she can’t seem to grasp,_ she’s a jinchuuriki, she’s a fourteen year old medic and a twenty year old student nurse. She’s died two violent deaths that she can’t stop replaying behind her eyes. She is in a world that should only exist in fantasy, fighting a war that is all too real. Her best friend tried to kill her and should have succeeded. She’s torn between remembering the ache of losing her _other_ best friend, and the knowledge that he’s actually still alive but thinks she’s dead and is on a path that will lead to the death and destruction of both himself and countless others.

Rin. It sits right, it feels right, but that’s not all she is. 

It leaves a sour taste in her mouth and a heavy feeling in her heart, but Rin will have to do until she can figure out where to go from here.

“How…How are you feeling, Rin-chan?” Sensei asks, leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees. “Kushina-san and I fixed up your seal, but are you experiencing any discomfort? Anything out of the ordinary?”

She shakes her head jerkily. “N—No. It — the, uh, the bijuu — is quiet now.”

Minato pauses, but there’s a hard look in his eyes. “I need you to tell me everything you can remember about what Kiri did to you.”

Rin will try, but everything is muddled and dark. She has everything confused, different experiences crossing between lives, memories overlapping. The only way she can really distinguish between the two is gleaming hitai-ate and kunai, as opposed to a familiar smile and a kitchen knife.

“It—It’s not very clear, sensei,” Rin admits. 

“Try anyway,” Minato presses. “I have to be out on the frontlines again in a couple of days, so we need to submit our reports soon.”

Right. Missions and reports. Frontlines. _Real life now this is real life now._ “I don’t remember being captured.” _Madara. Uchiha Madara._ “It was night, and they used a genjutsu I think. The Kiri-nin tort— Um,” she stops, not quite willing to use the word she _should_ because it makes it scarily real. “They questioned me, but I didn’t tell them anything. I don’t remember the sealing or the curse mark on my heart or anything, I just know that it hurt and then I— All I wanted was to run here and—and _destroy._ Kakashi rescued me, and the Kiri-nin found us.” _Lightning flashes and a thousand birds._ “I— Kakashi went to use his chidori. I knew that if we reached Konoha—“ _Home. Home. Home._ “—it would be a disaster. I’d already asked him to kill me, but he refused. I took the chidori.” _Stepped right in front of it. To save home, to save Konoha. And died, and woke up with two of me in one body. Too much life in a single person._ “I couldn’t think of another way to stop myself from running towards Konoha. I—Sensei, I died. I did, I felt it, I _died— I died—“_ She grasps at her arms and squeezes, hard.

Hands that are gentle and not cruel go to take her own, but she jerks away, presses herself to the other side of the bed and stares with wide eyes while berating herself. _It’s just Minato-sensei. Whether character or teacher, he wouldn’t hurt me._ But _hands._  

Minato looks at her with understanding, and it makes her feel ill and unclean. He shouldn’t have to look at her that way. He leans away with his hands in the air, placating. “Okay, it’s okay, Rin.” _No chan,_ she thinks, and the familiarity, the closeness of it makes her feel…not better, but more assured in herself and in Minato. “You saved countless lives with what you did, and no one will forget that. The trauma to your sternum was…severe. The bijuu healed you but exhausted itself. It certainly made the sealing easier.”

Rin wonders if she should thank the bijuu, the Sanbi, Isobu, but knows that she isn’t the main character of this show and that she’s more likely to be a jinchuuriki like Kushina than Naruto. A jailer to an undeserving prisoner, not a friend.

 

* * *

 

Her first night alone in her apartment is spent with the lights on in every room, a kunai in her hand, and reciting her times tables. When she can no longer multiply such awkward numbers, she moves onto medicine. Bones in the body, infections and treatments, different cancers. She goes on and on and on and eventually begins listing poisons. 

And on she goes, until dawn.

Rin stands, showers and avoids mirrors as she dresses.

Then she leaves to wander the village, and returns in the evening and repeats.

And on she goes.

 

* * *

 

Rin wakes with a knife or a chidori in her chest and a scream caught in her throat, and then neither of them are real so she rolls over and pretends she can’t feel her ANBU guard watching her.

This is her fifth day of living, and her first time sleeping.

 

* * *

 

In every shadow there is a man in a dark hooded jacket that watches her, and around every corner is a hand waiting to grab her and drag her back into hell.

 

* * *

 

Though she has always been Rin, she used to be someone else too, a lifetime and two weeks ago.

 

* * *

 

Nohara Rin is her name.

 

* * *

 

She once had another.


	2. Chapter 2

_“I didn’t deserve this.”_

_“No one deserves this.”_

 

* * *

 

They tell her she’s on extended medical leave, but Rin knows that she’s now Konoha’s best kept secret. A second jinchuuriki and an accomplished medic; the world knows Konoha is home to the Kyuubi, but Kiri have not yet admitted to their loss of the Sanbi. They will assume Rin is dead, her body lost to the river or destroyed by Konoha-nin, and the Sanbi waiting to reform in a decade or so. 

No one save the Hokage, the Council, her ANBU detail, Kushina and her team know the truth about what she is.

(And even then it isn’t the full truth, because how could she possibly begin to tell the people she loves that they are alien to her? That she can’t bear to see her foreign face in the mirror and feel nothing but detachment? That she knows when the Sandaime and the Yondaime will die, and that it will be at the hands of their wayward students?)

_(Obito Obito Obito how could you be so cruel to this world?)_

For all that she escaped death, Rin has forgotten how to live.

 

* * *

 

Everywhere, everywhere she sees ghosts and enemies.

She does not sleep.

 

* * *

 

It’s Minato who comes to her first. They have all visited, of course, but there is something about his face, solemn and _wrong_ , that tells her this is not just him stopping in for a check up.

“Rin-chan, you aren’t well,” he says, and it’s strange to hear him so direct when usually he has such great concern for saying anything that will set her off. He really is worried.

And she can’t lie, not to him, not to a man who before she thought of as a mentor and a brother but now finds can’t fill the void left behind from her _real_ brother who will cry and cry and cry when the police find her body and tell her family that she won’t be coming home, that she was beaten and cut and whipped and—

Rin makes tea for them both, and they sit quietly for a while on her lumpy little sofa. She presses herself as far into the corner as she can.

“If—If you won’t talk to me, or Kushina-san, would you talk to a Yamanaka? Inoue deals with the aftermath of these kinds of missions all the time, she’s a very kind person, you—“

“Please, I—“ She can’t. She can’t she can’t she _can’t._ Where would she even begin? How could she describe to anyone the experience of dying twice over and going from one living hell into another? 

Minato moves to kneel on the floor in front of her, and she can’t avoid his eyes. “You’re a medic and for all the Sanbi can heal your physical injuries, what’s up here,” and he taps her forehead before she can jerk away, “Can only be healed by you, helped by others if you’ll let them.”

Rin feels like she should tell him something. Feels like she owes it to him, just for the sake of giving Minato some peace of mind.

She opens her mouth to say something, maybe _I haven’t slept in two months,_ or perhaps _I feel eyes on me everywhere I go,_ or even _I have lived two lives and both should have ended already._

But the words die on her tongue.

Minato sighs slightly, but gives her a patient smile. 

He drinks his tea and leaves with a weary line to his shoulders.

 

* * *

 

**“You’ll kill us both, carrying on like this.”**

 

* * *

 

Rin ignores the rumbling voice at the back of her head, and heads to the library. She picks up several books on code breaking, checks them out, and spends the next three weeks devouring them.

 

* * *

 

An innocent pink journal sits before her, and her code is fresh in her mind. She takes a pen and opens the book.

Rin realises she can’t find the words she needs to even begin to describe what she wants to record. 

This is her third month of living, and for the first time since waking in the rain Rin feels real, raw emotion in the form of anger.

She takes her frustrations out on herself, pounding at her legs and arms until she throbs and biting down on the screams that threaten to escape and alert her ANBU.

The journal sits empty.

 

* * *

  

Her reflections are wrong. Rin is average height for her age, slender and angular with hard muscle from training daily with Kakashi and Minato-sensei. _Before she was tall and soft bodied, healthy from swimming and a good diet but little else._

Rin has brown eyes and short hair. _Before she was blonde, with pale grey eyes._

Her face is prettier than plain, but not especially striking either, distinguishable mainly by the markings of a deceased clan. _Before she was told she was beautiful and she knew it, and she owned it. Perhaps that was her undoing, or maybe it was just her carelessness._

Rin sees herself and sees a girl she has been all her life, and desperately misses the woman she had grown into. 

She stares into the mirror and wonders when she stopped seeing the girl there as herself.

The scar on her chest is a badge of shame.

 

* * *

 

Kushina storms into her day like a hurricane, sweeping her up and quite literally carrying her out of the apartment and into town for lunch. They eat ramen, of course, Ichiraku’s. Being here leaves Rin with a sense of both nostalgia and surreality and she finds she has little appetite at all.

“Rin-chan? Something wrong?” Kushina asks, and there must be a very odd expression on Rin’s face indeed if even Kushina has noticed.

She doesn’t know what to say. There is happiness attached to this place, memories of laughter. And with that comes Obito, who is out there and suffering and ready to make everyone _else_ suffer. And there is the knowledge that Kushina will die, and her son will come here as a safe place from a village that hates him, and Rin has seen all of this with her little brother by her side on rainy days when their parents had gone on holiday.

It’s—It’s just _too much._  

“Alright, come with me!” Kushina says, tossing some coins on the counter and grasping Rin’s wrist.

She has to jog to keep up.

 

* * *

 

Kushina drags her to Training Ground Five.

“Listen I know being a jinchuuriki is a piece of work, but it’s not the end of the world, dattebane! It’s gonna take time for you to get used to adjusting your chakra outputs and stuff like that, but think how much stronger you’re gonna be! Come on, Rin-chan, it’s not all bad!” she says it like a jounin commander, legs shoulder width apart and hands on her hips as she glowers down at Rin as though daring her to tell her she’s wrong.

Rin stays silent, and perhaps this is a mistake because a flash of concern cracks the stern mask, and Kushina tilts her head to the side and eases her posture. 

“Is it the seal that’s bothering you? Has the Sanbi been talking to you?”

“I ignore him. The seal’s fine, Kushina-san,” Rin says quietly, able to give that much at least.

Now Kushina really does look worried, and she crouches a little, reaching out to put her hands on Rin’s shoulders but _Rin can’t have her that close, she can’t deal with hands on her and especially not when she’s staring a woman in the eyes who she knows is going to die._

Something must show in her expression, because Kushina drops her hands to her knees instead.

“Minato told me you don’t want to talk to a Yamanaka.”

Rin looks away. “I can’t.”

“They’ve dealt with much worse cases than you before Rin-chan,” Kushina says gently, with a sad little smile nothing at all like her usual sunshine-grins.

 _Are you sure? If you knew, could you still say that?_  

 

* * *

 

Rin wakes in a cold sweat and stumbles into the bathroom to empty her stomach.

She scratches at the silvery scar on her chest, and wonders when her unconscious mind stopped being able to tell the difference between the gleam of a blade and a lightning flash.

 

* * *

 

She reaches for her journal, and still the words won’t come.

  

* * *

 

Knives carve burning paths in her flesh, and the crack of a whip jolts her from sleep and into wakefulness. 

Her heaving breaths choke off and die when she sees a lone figure at the window _he’s back he’s back he’s back_ _I can’t do it again_ and it takes her a solid minute to realise that it’s Kakashi, just Kakashi and not— not some enemy Kiri-nin, not Madara, and not— _not him._

Rin can’t stop gasping, blood is roaring in her ears and as she raises shaking hands to her face she feels the wet of tears. The room is dark, she’s sure she went to bed with the lights on but the room is dark and as she reaches over to switch the lamp on she can’t choke down the panicked sob when nothing happens.

“The power in your building is out,” supplies Kakashi, quietly.

Rin takes this in, takes deep breaths as she tries to steady her heart rate. _Inhale, hold, exhale. Inhale, hold, exhale._

She barely has time to think _why does Kakashi have to see me like this_ and she’s staggering to the bathroom to vomit. Her knees hit the cold tiles hard, and she shoves her hair back just in time. 

Rin feels Kakashi’s presence hovering awkwardly in her bedroom and she’s _so damn tired_ she doesn’t even have the energy to be mortified.

She’s a twenty year old woman but she’s also thirteen and can’t get rid of that lingering sense of _crushorsomethingstronger_ from her heart, and she wishes she didn’t feel so crushingly alone even while her friend was so close. 

Rin goes to lean back against the bathtub and shrieks slightly when she sees Kakashi looming in the doorway. She stares for a moment, short, quick gasps coming from her mouth as she tries to curb her panic because it’s just Kakashi and it’s not his fault he moves like a ghost. After a moment she finds it in herself to sag against the bathtub, knees drawn to her chest because the bathroom is cold and dark and she _hates_ the dark, can’t stand all these shadows and just waiting for the glint of steel or a cruel smile or a fist flying blindly towards her face.

She shudders and grips her knees tight.

Rin hears Kakashi leave, and she knows he’s putting conscious effort into making noise around her apartment as he listens to him rummage through one of her kitchen drawers. He returns in less than a minute, and she stiffens when she feels rather than sees him kneel close to her on the bathroom floor.

A match is struck, and Kakashi proceeds to light every candle she owns and place them around the bathroom. Nowhere is left dark, and he closes the door so she can’t see the looming void of her bedroom. He doesn’t sit beside her, or say a word, but rather sits on the side of the bathtub and within reaching distance.

And Rin is grateful.

 

* * *

 

“When my father died, I didn’t speak to anyone about it. I don’t remember if it was the shame or the guilt — both, maybe. But Minato-sensei came along and started checking up on me when he learnt I was living alone and— and I told him, and it helped. I haven’t spoken to anyone about—about Obito. I…It took years for me to be able to even acknowledge my father’s existence, and I don’t know if I’ll ever want to talk about Kannabi, but what happened to you happened while you were under my watch, in my squad, and that’s _twice_ now I’ve let you down, and—“

Rin wraps her arms around Kakashi’s leg, pressing her forehead to his knee. “Stop. St—Just stop. Please. _Please._ It’s not your fault. Kakashi, it’s not it’s not it’s _not—“_ she has to stop herself before she can start screaming, screaming about the demons in her head that have absolutely nothing to do with the Sanbi and everything to do with why she wants nothing more than to scratch at that awful scar on her chest but doesn’t because Kakashi doesn’t need the reminder of what she made him do.

“Rin—“ Kakashi moves slowly, warily, and reaches out to place hands on her shoulders, every so light and careful. She flinches, but not nearly as bad as she would have had the room still been cast in darkness. “Rin, talk to someone, you need to talk about it. It sounds stupid from me, but you’re killing yourself and I—“

It goes unspoken, but echoes loudly in the silence. 

 _Neither one of us can lose the other now. Not when Obito is out there, suffering and waiting._  

She grits her teeth, squeezes her eyes shut so that she might be able to ignore the stinging there. In the darkness she doesn’t see knives or lightning, but rather an orange mask and a spinning Sharingan, and it is difficult for her to come to terms with this reality, to be able to relate this two-dimensional character of tragedy to the very real, so very _kind_ boy that she knew not one year ago.

Yes, she owes it to Minato and Kushina to get better, but Kakashi… She owes Kakashi more than that, because while she loves her sensei and his future wife _so much,_ they may die, and Kakashi will be left to pick up the pieces.

_Not alone this time, for some awful reason I’m still here._

Rin owes Kakashi more than he will ever know, and so she vows, “I’ll tell you.”

She feels him tense slightly, and realises ruefully that he hadn’t expected her to choose _him_ to open up to. “Rin…? I’m not— Ah, I’m not very… _adept_ at…”

“Not right now. Not now, I won’t tell you now. I—“ she thinks about the empty journal and the ghosts that haunt her every step, and the blades that shimmer in her periphery when she daydreams. “I’m not ready yet. But when I talk, it will be to you, Kakashi.”

There is a long silence, but then Kakashi sighs. “Right. Alright.”

And they stay sat in her bathroom until the light of dawn comes creeping through the bottom of the bathroom door and when he leaves to let her wash and dress, she emerges to find a flashlight and a new pack of candles on her bedside table, and the apartment empty but for her. 

 

* * *

 

Rin sits at her desk, pen in hand and journals open. Code in mind, Rin begins to write.

_“The Third Shinobi World War ends when Namikaze Minato wipes out the Iwa forces singlehandedly.”_

And she writes.

 

* * *

 

When Rin is finished with her journal for the day, she finds Kakashi sitting on her bedroom windowsill with his back to the room. She watches for a moment, then goes to the bathroom to dress for bed, makes a cup of tea and sets it beside him. He glances at her briefly, and then turns away completely. 

Rin slides into bed, and when she glances over her shoulder the tea is in a gloved hand while the other is occupied with one of her medical texts. 

 

* * *

 

The nightmares still come, but when she wakes to find Kakashi dozing in the window, she finds herself calming quicker than before.

She shudders as she gets out of bed and grabs the spare blanket from the sofa. Rin takes the book from lax hands, aware of Kakashi’s chakra rousing as he wakes and completely ignoring it.

Rin throws the blanket over him, and returns to bed.

 

* * *

 

She sleeps until morning.

Kakashi is gone and the blanket is neatly folded on the windowsill, her book on the nervous system placed on top and the empty cup beside it.

 

* * *

 

And every evening, it repeats.

 

* * *

 

There are a thousand birds swooping at her, and they peck through her heart with razor beaks.

Rin is afraid of them, but vows she won't ever let the birds know.


	3. Chapter 3

_"_ _It hurt."_

_"_ _I know."_

_"_ _But everything before it was so awful that it was almost worth it at the end."_

_"…_ _I know."_

* * *

Rin has been alive for four months now, and while she knows she is not fixed, knows that probably she never will be, she is better.

* * *

Her days are much as they were before everything went so wrong, with slight variation. She meets with Kakashi and Minato-sensei early in the morning, and they train until early afternoon. When Kakashi goes to spar with Minato-sensei, Kushina comes for Rin and they disappear to a separate training ground in the far reaches of Konoha.

"Becoming a jinchuuriki will be like being in the Academy all over again, dattebane," says Kushina when Rin asks why she requires special training when she should be at the hospital. They're understaffed there as it is. "Your chakra control is shot to hell, and even the smallest of justus are gonna blow up in your face until you get a hang of things. Honestly, you're kind of old to suddenly have a bijuu sealed in you, but because we don't really have any records for this… Well. We'll see what happens."

What happens is that when Rin is told to produce a simple bunshin, she creates a sad two dimensional imitation of a person that folds to the ground like wet paper.

Back at the Academy indeed.

* * *

Her evenings are…different. She eats alone, reads her medical scrolls, and then sits at her desk to write. The words come easier, now that she's started.

The best place to begin, she originally thought, was wherever she is in the main timeline of events; Third Shinobi War and onwards. And when she goes right up to the events of Obito's death and Kaguya (and her coded journal is slightly messy here, where her tears had dropped to the page before she even realises she's crying) she finishes with a firm line underneath everything and then moves onto… _Before._ It's difficult, more difficult than writing about this world, because she has to face everything she had left behind.

Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all had clearly never been torn from their world in a bloody, violent death with _hands that tear and steel that burns and—_

Rin struggles through it, and she painstakingly recounts whatever inane detail of her old home is brought to mind.

And when she turns away from her desk Kakashi is there, on her windowsill with a book or scroll in hand.

She showers and dresses for bed, then makes tea and retrieves the blanket from the sofa. Sometimes she drinks tea with him, other times she leaves his cup beside him and goes straight to bed.

When she wakes in the night — as she always, always does — he is there, in the window, entirely silent, and she takes a deep breath, sometimes gets up and has another shower or a glass of water, and Rin goes back to sleep.

* * *

And again, and again.

* * *

And when Kakashi is on active duty once more and leaves her behind in Konoha she tells herself she's fine now, she's coping.

She wakes for the first time in weeks to emptiness and fear, and has to run to the bathroom to empty her stomach.

* * *

So when Kakashi is gone, Rin spends her nights writing. She writes and writes until her hand cramps or until she gets so lost in the memories that only a suspicious bang or a cough from somewhere one of her ANBU guard were absolutely, definitely not standing snaps her out of whatever funk she'd fallen into.

And when that happens, she rises from her desk and stretches, does some gentle exercises in her living room, and then showers and continues to write.

* * *

When Kakashi returns, his birthday has been and gone but she and Minato and Kushina give him his presents anyway.

Minato gifts him sealing inks and brushes as well as a new pair of durable gloves and a scarf. Kushina gets him a cuddly pug doll and top of the range kunai.

Rin gives him a soft, cosy blanket, and also some extras for the first aid kit she gave him before Kannabi.

* * *

The blanket stays at her apartment, and every evening it is put to use, and they continue.

* * *

Rin has been alive six months, and she has filled ten journals.

* * *

Three are for memories of the timeline, tiny details and connections she thinks she remembers and desperately tries to account as closely as her jumbled mind will allow. Cause, and effect.

* * *

Five are for Before; they are blotched with messy strokes of her pen and have pages torn out in places from where it has become too much too fast, too painful too soon, and she has to remove what she has written to start again the next evening.

These journals she both loves and despises with such ferocity it makes her sick.

* * *

One is dedicated to Obito, to memories of him when they were young and best friends and then onwards, to when he was mad and raving and then finally a dying man, old before his time.

* * *

One is for the three of them together — Kakashi, Obito and her — and almost, almost breaks down when she runs out of memories.

This journal is not even half full.

* * *

"Do you have nightmares, Kakashi-kun?" Rin asks one evening. It is a change from the usual companionable silence of the frightened child and her guard dog.

There is a long period of silence, and Rin finishes her tea and crawls beneath the bedcovers. She slips a hand beneath the pillow to rest over the cool metal of her kunai.

She is almost asleep when Kakashi's voice softly replies, "Yes."

* * *

Rin dreams of sun on a blue ocean, and a giant turtle, and for the first time since waking on that bleak battlefield she sleeps through the night without waking once.

* * *

"I know it gets frustrating, but you're really doing well," Kushina says to her as they break for lunch.

Rin has been working her way through C-rank jutsu — rather, she has been trying and failing to work her way through them. Genjutsu and anything below some of the stronger B-rank jutsu escape her completely, sometimes ending in a pathetic little poof of smoke, other times quite literally exploding in her face.

Her doubt and disappointment must show on her face, because Kushina's grin softens into something gentle a little rueful.

"When Mito-sama transferred the Kyuubi to me, all the water jutsu I'd perfected were completely useless to me. I almost _drowned_ myself at least three times when I was training with them later. So, trust me," she says, and brushes some hair from Rin's face. Six months ago, she would have cowered away, but now Rin only bites the inside of her cheek a little to keep from reacting. "You're doing well. A few more weeks and I'd say you're even fit for active duty again, but then that really isn't up to me."

No, that's up to the Council and the Hokage, both of which involve Danzo breathing down someone's neck, and as such Rin will be confined to the village until everyone is sure she isn't an insane, faulty Jinchuuriki with a violent streak. (She's _trying_ but honestly half the battle there is convincing herself _._ )

"What's the sea like?" Rin asks, because even though she dimly remembers days at a seaside _Before_ , here she has never been to the coast. Her dreams of late, when not cruel distortions of lightning and steel, have been of a tranquil ocean glittering beneath the sunlight.

Kushina looks surprised at the change of subject, and then wistful. "It's… Well. I come from a different village, you know that? Konoha doesn't… they don't really teach you about this village, because it doesn't exist anymore. It was destroyed in the last days of the Second War."

And Kushina looks so sad, so foreign in that moment with her blood hair and sea-spray eyes, colouring not at all native to Fire Country, and she hasn't even said the name of her lost home.

"Uzushiogakure," Rin says, because it's a place that deserves a name, she thinks, if Kushina is from there.

Kushina once again looks surprised. "You know the name? Heh, and here I thought we were struck from the history books…"

"I found some old maps in the library…" Which is true enough even if it's not how she knows the name.

"Uzushio. Ah… I don't remember much about the village when it still existed, and I've only been back once since Kiri destroyed it, but the sea there… It's beautiful, dattebane. Looks like sapphires when the sun catches the water just right, but the colour is different every day, in every place. Greens and blues and greys and everything in between, warm enough even in winter to swim in because of the seals the Uzumaki put around the place. The sea is kind of amazing, Rin-chan," Kushina says, and her bright grin is back and only slightly shadowed with loss. "Why the sudden curiosity?"

Rin falls back to lay on the grass, gazing up at the fathomless cerulean sky. "Just wondering if my dreams are right at all."

Kushina lays with her, and they talk about the sea some more, and Kushina tells her everything she possibly can about Uzushio, and they don't train any more that day but Rin leaves feeling much more content and satisfied than she has since she started these lessons.

* * *

Kakashi comes back from a mission bloody and bruised and with his arm hanging out of its socket and kunai in his side and _he isn't in the hospital oh my god oh my god—_

"What the _hell_ are you doing here?" Rin demands, taking in the sight of her friend, her safety net, her only security that she won't lose her fucking mind in this world, half-dead and getting deader.

"Well," Kakashi says, and he clearly thinks that leaning casually on the windowsill will fool her into thinking he isn't swaying which he so very obviously is. "I thought I'd come to my favourite medic-nin before I bled out."

And he promptly collapses.

"Shit. Shit shit _shit—"_ Rin races to grab her medical kit, a bulky thing that she keeps stocked up and always finds something new to add when she goes shopping, and skids to her knees beside Kakashi.

Near the kunai embedded in his rib is another hole, lower, like the assailant stabbed once, pulled out, then stabbed again and left the kunai behind.

She can't heal this, well she _could_ but her control isn't good enough and she's more likely to put a bigger hole in Kakashi's chest if she tries anything but he's _bleeding out on her floor—_

She sees herself, gasping and writhing and clinging to the hope that someone, anyone, will come for her, save her, _any day now it will be any day now they'll come for me and I'll go home and I'll see mom and dad and and and he brother her brother oh god oh god why can't she remember their names their_ ** _faces_** _—_

She doesn't want to die, she doesn't want to die, she doesn't she doesn't—

"Rin—" Kakashi chokes, and there's a hand on her wrist and she's back in Konoha, back in this terrible world that she hates and hates and hates and her friend is dying and she's just sitting there.

She doesn't want him to die.

He will not die.

He can't.

"ANBU-san, if any of you are medics I'd _really_ appreciate some—some help. Please. Or get someone. _Now."_

Rin rolls up her sleeves and places her hands over the oozing wound and ignores the voices screaming at her that this is wrong, wrong, wrong people shouldn't be able to _do_ this, and she lets the cool wash of healing chakra flow to her palms and prays to any god there is that she doesn't kill her best friend.

* * *

She doesn't kill her best friend.

ANBU arrive back with a medic and one of her guards has to pry her away from an unconscious Kakashi because she can't move, can't break her concentration or she'll most definitely end up doing some damage, and then Kakashi is being carried away on a stretcher and Rin is kneeling in a pool of blood on her floor, alone, guard back in place and a terrible stifling silence in her apartment and blood on her hands and soaked into her clothes and—

And Rin saved Kakashi.

* * *

Minato finds her, still kneeling there. He comes into her bedroom with careful, quiet footsteps, somehow managing to avoid the red mess on her floor as he crouches before her.

"Rin-chan?"

There are things she could say to him, she supposes. Is Kakashi alright, can you help me stand because I think my legs are numb, is Kakashi alright, I managed to heal someone, is Kakashi alright? But she can't will the words into her mouth, can't summon the energy to just say something, anything to assuage Minato's worries and she feels terrible but she's so used to feeling terrible that it just slides right off the shit heap of her mind.

A hand touches her shoulder and she shrinks inwards, curling until her forehead touches her knees, closing her eyes and just willing herself _away._

Minato sighs. "You're not staying here tonight." He takes her arm and she feels the shift of chakra around her and even through her eyelids she sees the yellow, feels electricity across her skin, and suddenly the smell of blood is still present but fainter underneath a familiar note of _comfort._ Rin opens her eyes to the black and white tile of Minato and Kushina's kitchen floor, and oh she's getting blood on the tile, its seeped into her clothes and is leaving smears on the white, less noticeable on black but still there in a slight off-ness of colour, she hopes they aren't mad—

"Come on, Rin-chan, let's get you cleaned up," it's Kushina, she's here and taking the place of Minato with arms around her, pulling her up, and suddenly now that she's not on the floor Rin can feel the world around her again, feels it acutely in her senses and shame burns in her stomach as she reflects on her behaviour.

She clears her throat. "H—How is Kakashi?"

Kushina, with her arm around Rin's shoulders, smiles down at her. "He's stable. You saved his life, Rin-chan."

She shudders, her eyes sting, and sniffles a bit. "Good. That—That's good. Sorry, I—I won't impose, I'm fine now, I—I'll clean your floor and go home, I need to clean up—"

A hand knocks her head and she yelps.

Kushina scowls down at her. "Baka! You're not going back to that dismal apartment tonight, dattebane."

Tears are falling and Rin feels so incredibly stupid but as she goes to wipe her eyes she sees her hands full of congealed blood and stops, curling her fingers into fists and holding them close to her body.

And she can't stop crying.

For so long now she's held in the inevitable breakdown, and for all her screaming fits and rages at herself and frustrated tears and post-nightmare reliefs she hasn't yet allowed herself to really cry.

And now she can't stop.

She hiccups and gasps and her vision is blurred and nose is running and Rin knows she must look disgusting because she _feels_ disgusting but she can't _stop._

Kushina takes her into the living room and without a single care for the upholstery sits Rin down on the sofa and holds her as she cries.

"Come on, Rin, it's okay. It's going to be fine, just you wait. The war is almost over and everything will be better from then on, dattebane. You're going to be just fine, you'll see," Kushina says softly, smoothing Rin's hair down and it makes it worse, makes it all so much _more_ because she thinks _Kushina will be a good mother_ and knows she won't ever get the chance, that any hopes she may have of seeing the Uzushio legacy — the future of the Uzumaki clan — live on will be destroyed in a few years and Rin—

Rin can't. What she can't she doesn't know but she just— She can't.

Can't live to see that happen, can't live with herself if she lets it happen, can't let the pain and misery that follows come to pass.

"Rin-chan," says Minato, and he sits on her other side, places a hand on her shoulder. "The war will be over soon, I promise you that. Kakashi will be fine, and we'll all have a nice relaxing leave afterwards. It'll be over soon, Rin."

She loves them. She loves them, she loves them and she can hardly bear it because— After the war, things will look to be picking up but she knows, she knows they will die not long after, and Rin will have to watch Kakashi break into pieces if she herself doesn't lose herself entirely.

And she just can't.

Won't. The thought comes to her, and it's something she's entertained before, of course, but never allowed herself to put too much stock into, couldn't bear the idea of putting everything she has on such a fragile hope with the knowledge that if she fails she won't ever be able to fix the fragments of her shattered soul, and yet.

And yet Rin thinks, desperately, that everything would be so much better if Naruto has a mother, if Minato remains Hokage, if Kakashi doesn't have to bear the weight of the ghosts of his family following him for the rest of his days.

In that instant, wedged between the closest people she has to family in this world where she has nothing, Rin knows that she will change the future of this world or die trying.

Rin will give everything she has for what little she has left.

* * *

"Will you ever talk to me about it, Rin-chan?" asks Minato that night, standing at the door to the guest room as she sits in bed.

She has thought about this. Kakashi she will tell, one day when she's ready, but Minato… The idea of burdening him with this, with the knowledge that she isn't just the girl he trained from an impressionable Academy graduate into a capable chunin, seems unfair to her. But is it anymore unfair that letting him watch her in this never-ending cycle of self-destruction and fixing herself with no rhyme or reasoning behind it?

"I think," Rin begins. "That if you ordered me to tell you, I might."

And that, too, is unfair. But it's unfair for both of them this way, uncomfortable and unfortunate but better than choking on her tongue and screaming the words at him when she reaches her breaking point. A report to her jounin-sensei — that she can do. Clinical, detached, telling the story of Nohara Rin and the Woman From Before as though they are separate entities. Distanced. Safer. Clean.

Minato sighs a little but nods. "I hope it won't come to that, Rin-chan. I really do."

"So do I," she says softly, because they both know the only time he would give her such a cruel command would be if she was spiralling beyond salvation, if his trust in her was so broken that he needed the justification behind her madness to understand.

Minato leaves, and if every light in the house is left on that night not one of them comment on it.

* * *

Rin wakes in the night with a scream caught in her throat in a foreign room, but then she knows where she is and collapses back with a sigh. Minato sits in the armchair in the corner of the room, silently sipping his tea and reading a book.

He doesn't say a word, and neither does she, and it feels almost like normal.

(But he isn't Kakashi, and it takes her some time falling asleep again.)

* * *

Her eleventh journal is the only one with a title:

_Dreams for the Future_

Rin plans.


	4. Chapter 4

_“Why should we suffer any more?”_

_“Why should they suffer when we could help?”_

* * *

 

Kakashi eyes her with an unreadable expression, bandage in place of his hitai-ate over the Sharingan and around his chest and his arms. He looks like a mess. A terrible, awful, cruel mess and Rin feels angry, she’s actually kind of furious and it surprises her but she rolls with it, rolls with this raw emotion that comes so easy after crying her heart out in Minato and Kushina’s arms because she feels she is _entitled_ to it.

“You’re alive then,” she says, attempting to keep her voice carefully level and failing _awfully_ because it shakes and wavers and even hisses a little bit.

Kakashi still watches her with that guarded expression. “Yes. Thank you.”

Rin grits her teeth. “What were you _thinking?”_

He looks confused, a little shocked at her tone. She doesn’t think she’s ever spoken to him like this. “Thinking? I was on a mission, Rin. It wasn’t like I intentionally went out to get stabbed.”

Stabbed, he was stabbed twice in the ribs, puncturing the lung. Once in the leg, barely missing the artery. Cracked skull and shattered femur and chakra exhaustion and _so much blood loss—_

Rin sees a flash of steel, feels cold metal sliding into her heart, is suddenly equally grateful and resentful of her fury because it brings tears to her eyes with these memories but keeps her upright and breathing and decidedly _not_ collapsing into a quivering mess.

“I _mean,”_ she hisses, wrapping her arms around herself to keep herself together and whole. _“I mean what were you thinking coming to me, baka!”_

Kakashi blinks as though he has no idea what she’s talking about, which is ridiculous because he _knows,_ he _knows what she is and what she has inside her what the Kiri-nin put inside her what Madara forced on her—_ Kakashi knows and should have known better. “You’re a healer. You saved my life.”

“I could have _killed_ you,” she chokes out, and the horror of the possibility grips her and turns her red hot fury cold, chills her so that she starts shaking and she is holding herself together, holding herself so that she doesn’t fracture and spill across the hospital floor even as she hears a mocking laugh echoing in her skull and sees the shadow cast by the curtain morph into something more human-like and terribly familiar. “You— You almost died, Kakashi-kun, I almost didn’t save you.”

And he has the gall to look exasperated. “I knew you’d be fine—“

“Have you heard how my lessons with Kushina-san have been going? Have you? Because my chakra control is so poor I can’t even perform a kawarimi.”

Kakashi seems frustrated, _good,_ that’s how she feels. “But you were _fine—“_

The shadows move and she knows it’s just her seeing things because Kakashi doesn’t even twitch and she knows it’s time to leave. “Get well soon, Kakashi-kun.”

And she leaves trailing blood that only she can see.

* * *

Rin goes home. As soon as she opens the door the scent of disinfectant and wood polish hits her, and her eyes instantly move across the room to the stain on the floor. Barely visible, certainly clean, but still darker than the wood around. The shadow is in her home. He’s looming and waiting with a belt and knives and lightning and he _smiles._

She stares at the spectre that isn’t really there but stands where Kakashi’s bleeding body once lay and she shakes and she’s sinking, sinking to the floor and she should run away fast and never stop running but he doesn’t move, he just stands there and grins and the laugh echoes around her apartment and she’s back, she’s back in the cellar she’s going to fucking _die—_

There is a knock against her window.

Rin blinks and the shadow is just a stain on her floorboards and a memory cursing her mind. She really ought to start leaving snacks out for her ANBU. She’s pretty sure she isn’t actually supposed to know they’re there but they’ve been doing a pretty lazy job of hiding themselves. (She’s grateful.)

Rin unsteadily gets to her feet, skirts round the stain and goes to her room. She closes the door behind her, shutting the memory away. She showers, and she changes, and then she jumps out the window all to avoid the stain.

Rin is barely aware of where her feet are taking her, soaking up the sunlight and revelling in the absence of oppressive silence. Shapes that aren’t people and are more like bolts of lightning flicker at the edges of her vision, but she can’t hear any birds over the commotion of the lively streets so she’ll take what she can get. But it gets quieter, she finds, quieter and quieter and soon enough she’s coming to a standstill and the only sound is that of the unseasonably strong wind blowing through gravestones.

Nohara Takuma and Nohara Yumiko’s names stare coldly up at her from nondescript gravestones.

It’s odd, being here. Rin thinks that maybe she shouldn’t have come. Perhaps it is too soon. Here, her parents have been dead since the first month of the war. Taken on different missions, two weeks apart from one another.

Rin remembers her mother answering the door to receive the black scroll containing Takuma’s body. Rin remembers opening the door to receive her mother’s scroll only four days after the funeral.

_(Obito, Obito you held me, you held me and let me cry and you cried too because they treated you more like family than your own ever did, Obito. Obito, where are you now? Where are you now I have another family to mourn?)_

She doesn’t have graves, doesn’t have names, doesn’t even have _faces—_ Her memory has failed her and all she has are anecdotes of a family she can’t properly recall. She feels— drained. Tired in a way she hasn’t felt since coming here. All the crying and the anger, it’s really taken it’s toll but in—in a good way, she supposes. She feels less like a ticking time bomb but knows that at any moment she could start sobbing and it’s a raw feeling.

It is too soon for her to be here. Rin doesn’t have anything to say to them, doesn’t know how to tell their ghosts that their daughter has been stretched and snapped and bent into new and uncomfortable shapes just to fit into her own flesh, doesn’t know how to tell them she could burst out at any moment and scream and scream and scream until she dies. Can’t think of the words to tell her parents this, can’t bring herself to admit that these people _are_ her parents just as much as the ones she left behind.

Rin turns to leave, sick with the mistake of coming here, and she sees a man with hair like ink and skin like snow.

She can’t move, because here is another stark reminder that the story she knew from a television is reality, here is Orochimaru standing at the graves of his parents just as she had been. A real man, with real thoughts, and the very real potential for destruction.

Slitted golden eyes meet her stare, and Rin has a split second of motionlessness as adrenaline works its way around her body and she thinks _fight or flight_ and then thinks _stupid stupid stupid he isn’t a traitor yet_ and then thinks _he will make a monster of Uchiha Sasuke_ and _does he know about the Sanbi._

Rin turns and flees the cemetery at what she hopes appears to be a casual stroll but must look far too stiff and awkward to really pass.

(And she thinks, she thinks she has a memory of the Academy where she watches Kakashi across the playground greeting his father Sakumo at the end of the day and she thinks she recalls a beautiful man with long black hair and a face she couldn’t ascertain to be male or female and a smile that was as soft as it was exasperated as he exchanged words with Sakumo. Rin remembers seeing Orochimaru and thinking _what a beautiful person_ and she can’t relate that distant encounter to the figure she knows to be a cold blooded child killer. This is what rainy days with her brother couldn’t tell her, what the show and her journals can’t prepare her for: the bare, naked _humanity_ of these real, breathing people.)

* * *

 

Kushina opens the door to Rin’s quiet knocks, smiling warmly. “Come on in, Rin-chan.”

Tea is brewed and they sit on the sofa in comfortable silence, but of course with Kushina it isn’t to last.

“Is Kakashi-kun feeling better?” she asks, tucking a long lock of crimson hair behind her ear.

Rin stares into her tea. “Aa. Cheerful as ever.”

Kushina snorts. “That brat could do with a time out in the hospital, dattebane. Maybe he’ll finally cool down from his latest craze of volunteering for stupidly dangerous missions.”

She holds back a wince. Rin has been so absorbed in herself, so wrapped up in her problems, that she never stopped to consider the problems of those around her. Kakashi is a year younger than her and thinks Obito is dead, holds Obito’s eye in his skull and has the weight of the Uchiha clan’s disapproval bearing down on him near enough every day, still has people hissing and cursing his father’s name at him as he walks through the streets. Rin has been selfish, but she’s still kind of mad at him.

“He was _stupid._ He shouldn’t have come to me,” she says.

Kushina sighs. “Rin-chan, last night you did something truly amazing. If yesterday morning someone had told me you could perform the Mystical Palm to save a dying boy I would have laughed in their face and told them they’d had a few too many to drink. But Rin—“ And here she laughs, bright and cheerful in spite of Rin’s sullenness and Rin has to look up and face Kushina’s glorious cheer. “You showed such incredible chakra control I could hardly believe it when Minato told me what had happened.”

She flushes bright red, unable to help herself. She has been trying for so long — so, _so_ long now — to regain some semblance of the flawless chakra control she once had. Rin can still scarcely believe the previous day happened. It feels like a dream — or a nightmare, depending on how you look at it.

“I just— I just had to save him. I—I was _scared,”_ she whispers, looking away.

“Oh, Rin,” Kushina says so, so gently, and Rin doesn’t startle as her hair is pushed back from her face with a comforting hand. “Don’t be too mad at him for coming to you, dattebane. Kakashi knows his limits and I think last night he knew he’d reached one. That much blood loss and chakra exhaustion, he probably just wanted to see you after being away for so long.”

_Before,_ Rin wouldn’t have dared think Kakashi was possible of sentiment like that. But after night after night after long, painful night of having him there watching over her just so she could catch a few hours sleep Rin has learnt that what runs through Kakashi’s mind is unknown to her even after years of being on his team and watching him in another life.

Rin remembers what she was like _Before_. In both worlds she was medically inclined, wanting to help people to the best of her ability simply because she _cared_ too much. After—Well, after, she thought the possibility of being an iryō-nin was lost to her. Too much chakra, too dangerous with a bijuu trapped inside her. Now though Rin thinks of possibilities, the potential for her to actually become a healer.

(She wonders if Tsunade, as a Senju descended from powerhouses like Hashirama and Uzumaki Mito, ever struggled with chakra control. Rin wonders where she is and, for a moment, she thinks about Orochimaru once again, alone and friendless without his teammates in Konoha.)

“Do you think,” Rin begins, thinking and thinking and a strange feeling in her chest. “Do you think I could still be an iryō-nin?”

“I think after yesterday you’ve proven that with enough focus and determination you can be anything you want to be,” Kushina says, and she sounds so sure of it.

Rin smiles, and it’s a real smile. It doesn’t feel plastic and after a few minutes it begins to hurt her cheeks but she can’t stop even after they move onto other topics.

That odd sensation in her chest feels like hope.

* * *

In her journal, she writes:

_“Obito thinks I am dead. He will come for the Kyuubi on Oct. 10th in approximately two years, already fully trained with the mangekyou sharingan and mokuton. Madara has some influence over him — a seal? or just the promise of a dream world? — and Obito will not hesitate to kill both Minato-sensei and Kushina-san._

_If I can get close to him and show him I’m alive, will that be enough to stop him? Or will he be too far gone by then?”_

_“What do I do? What do I become? Minato-sensei will only have the time to teach my Fuuninjutsu until he becomes Hokage, but Kushina-san may be willing to teach me the Uzumaki sealing arts. My medical training is on hold until my chakra control is better but I know I have the ability to do it now. I can still be a medic._

_I want to help people._

_I want to save people.”_

* * *

Rin turns from her journal to find Kakashi on her windowsill, leaning against the frame. She sees the smallest sliver of bandage peeking out from the gap where sleeve ends and glove begins and feels some guilty that Kakashi feels obligated to spend every available evening with her.

“Are you sure you should be out of hospital?” she asks uncertainly, not knowing if he’s mad about her yelling at him earlier.

Kakashi mutters something that sounds like _sorry._

Rin stares for a second, then smiles. She makes tea for two, grabs Kakashi’s blanket and hands him his cup (and now it really is his cup, she supposes, after how often he’s used it; a hideous thing she loves with a very poorly painted scene of running dogs). Rin pushes herself up beside him on the windowsill and they sit, quietly, watching the sun set over houses and the Hokage Monument.

She sips her tea and lets her eyes slide shut, the last rays of golden light burning even through her eyelids. She feels the static buzz of chakra from Kakashi like she’s standing next to a towering pylon, and hears the slightest pulsating hum from her ANBU guard. Rin can’t say how many are watching her, but definitely more than one, she thinks. This is definitely a new ability courtesy of the Sanbi.

But Rin doesn’t want to think about her bijuu right now. That is a problem that will require some serious contemplation — another day. Now—Now Rin just wants to sit, and to _be._

She looks at Kakashi, who has an expression of utmost boredom on what she can see of his face. Sometimes Rin thinks about asking why, why does he stay, why does he come back night after night when all she does is wake up sweating or screaming or flailing her arms at things that aren’t really there. But that wouldn’t be fair. Kakashi has his reasons, and she doesn’t doubt for one minute that he cares about her in his own emotionally stunted way. So she never asks, she just lets it be and enjoys it for what it is. A girl who is scared of her own shadow and her looming protector, yes, but also two friends who don’t have an awful lot left.

“Kakashi-kun?” she asks.

He hums, sliding his eye over to her.

“Want to spar tomorrow?”

The look of surprise is only there for a second before Kakashi is raising an eyebrow. They haven’t sparred since Before. Her chakra control has been too poor, her injuries still too fresh and scars too tight for her to even use taijutsu against him. Rin knows that she won’t improve quick enough, won’t be ready for Obito unless she does something other than practise bunshin and kawarimi in between the occasional stronger jutsu. She must be better. She doesn’t have long.

“Fine. Don’t expect me to go easy.”

Rin huffs. “Yeah? Well, right back at you.”

His smile is brief, evident only in a slight twitch beneath the mask but it has Rin feeling lighter, turning back to the darkening sky with a little smile of her own.

* * *

 

_“I will save my precious people.”_


End file.
